Usually, I'm pretty late in getting ready for Halloween, or any Halloween party before the actual day. Since I just spent the evening helping a younger relative carve his pumpkin, I'm actually thinking a bit about it tonight.

I've worn my share of Star Wars costumes for Halloween. I'm actually not much into costumes, except this time of year. Anyway, I started off with the classic Darth Vader store bought child variety. I eventually turned a karate gi in to a Luke Skywalker costume and later borrowed a much better Jedi costume from a friend who makes way better costumes than I do.

Still, that's only a handful of Star Wars costumes over the years. I tend to recycle costumes, mostly due to lack of time. I've still got a Gordon Freeman Halflife HEV suit breastplate made of cardboard stashed in the garage. It's served in both HL and HL2 varieties. Much easier was the Daniel Jackson Stargate SG-1 costume - essentially dark blue BDUs with replica patches. The great thing about that one is that I use velcro for the patches, so I can reuse it for other things. One year, it became a Gizmonic Institute uniform, though it proved far too distant from MST3K's heyday for most people to get it.

Anyway, the gist of all this, is that with Halloween coming up, it's time to take a look at some of this year's Star Wars offerings. Last year, I saw a ton of Clone Troopers out and about. We'll see what's popular this time around. Obviously, it's really easy to get costumes these days (except maybe these Lego stormtroopers), so I'll point out a few other sources of Halloween goodness people might find useful:

Pumpkins: Really, just go to google or bing and do an image search for Star Wars pumpkin. You'll be rewarded with a ton of examples - some stencils, some just plain great freehand carving. I also just discovered the Star Wars Pumpkin Carving Kit....pretty much a regular carving kit with Star Wars stencils.

Paper masks: There used to be some good downloadable ones in the kids section of starwars.com, but of course, the links are now broken in the relaunch. You can see a variety of them here and some clone wars ones here. Maybe someone has them up elsewhere online.

Halloween music: OK, my search for relate Halloween music didn't go very well, but I did run across this very recent Wired Geek Dad post with a contest...A Stormtrooper for Halloween.